Act of God

by Marie Mosley

On Sunday, a flaming metal ball punched a hole through my roof, smashed my bathtub, and burned up my shower curtain; it would have set the whole house on fire if I hadn't been home to hit it with the fire extinguisher. My insurance sent out a guy to assess the damages. He told me it's a meteor, act of God, excluded on my policy. I pointed out that the thing had writing on it - some kind of foreign language, looked like Greek or maybe Russian - and he said, "Act of war, then, also excluded." So I was left stuck with this big boulder-thing sitting in the middle of my bathroom floor, and I didn't know if it's a meteor or a bomb or what, so I got in touch with the science department over at the university and they sent out some geeks who spent all day yesterday taking pictures of it and whispering into their cell phones. This morning, when NASA showed up at my door, I got my insurance agent on the phone and told him that if this thing was an act of God, it's not the God we're familiar with.